See Manhattan as you’ve never seen it before with this incredible LEGO model

LEGO Certified Professional Ryan McNaught sure knows how to make an impression with LEGO bricks. For the centerpiece of his current exhibition, titled Brickman Cities, Ryan designed this stunning replica of Lower Manhattan, which utilizes LEGO in a way we’ve never seen before.

Constructed of more than 210,000 entirely white bricks, the 1:600-scale city is incredibly accurate. Ryan and his team of builders used an overhead projector to cast satellite imagery of the city onto their build space, ensuring that each tower and street lines up precisely with its real-world counterpart.

the jam-packed buildings were designed and built over 572 hours, all with a very particular goal in mind. Through a painstaking process that took an additional 200 hours, Ryan had the experts at Projection Teknik map the entire LEGO cityscape in 3D. They then crafted a custom dynamic 4K projection for the city, which can map lights to the buildings.

However, the projection doesn’t just display present-day Manhattan. It also depicts other eras of the Big Apple, such as the verdant forests when the island was home to indigenous villages.